Yasmin Mariam Kloth, USA-Egypt
Source
My parents grew up
on an island in the Nile.
On a map it’s the shape
of a vessel docked
in blue-green waters. On a map,
the Nile flows North, the shape
of a lotus flower, arms
opening out to sea.
I took a boat once
between Luxor and Aswan.
There is no modern city
in this stretch of water and land.
How can there be
in a place where the river is older
than pieces of the sky?
How can there be on these banks,
where homes are sand, trees
waiting for the wind?
I stood on the deck, watched old worlds
float by. Men on feluccas
in white cotton looked at me
with the whites of their eyes.
They were kings.
They gave me riches
with their smiles, their faces wrinkled
by the sun, valleys of skin
in the valley of the Nile.
My parents didn’t raise me here.
They brought their language,
their food, their music,
their hopes for family in luggage
unpacked in New York.
I would not understand
the source of what they left
for many years.
This is how I learned
how the felucca travels.
Light on water,
with a sail to the wind.
Banyan Song
My grandmother
made a home in the snow
when she knew nothing
of snow, transplanted from the shade
of Banyan trees.
In the years after
her husband died, her roots
grew low and dry.
She was easy to pluck
from her homeland, followed
children who’d already left
for new life.
I visited her there
in her apartment in Montreal.
Nothing had changed
in the years that expanded into spaces
an ocean’s water could not fill.
My daughter hugged her in the entry
and she folded like a paper airplane
at the waist.
She had never been someone’s
great-grandmother before.
This was too much love
for her heart to give.
The distance between
their generations is not age.
The distance is language and loss.
The distance is the root
of the Banyan tree, measured in meters
from its leaves to the earth.
My grandmother consumes
this knowledge
with a nose
in my daughter’s hair.
Yasmin Mariam Kloth writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her writing explores love, loss, place and space, and has appeared in or been accepted by publications including Gravel, the West Texas Literary Review, The Tiny Journal, and the Willawaw Journal. Yasmin lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband and young daughter.